Grant: Operating Grant: Indigenous Gender and Wellness - Knowledge Sharing

Our team will gather women, men, and 2SLGBTQ+ people with day-to-day experience of Indigenous life in this city to share insights from new gender and wellness research and to hear their perspectives for gender-responsive research ethics standards. This is an essential step to create an Urban Indigenous Research Ethics Board. Our objectives are to: Co-develop and deliver plain-language, culturally relevant knowledge sharing (KS) materials from gender and wellness research; Share, and learn how community defines research, ethics and priorities; and Blend Indigenous and non-Indigenous research methodologies, to build capacity for the next generation of researchers. Indigenous methods such as Circle Gatherings, Auntie's Kitchens, land-based walks and visual arts, will provide safe space for community to discuss and record our aims to centre Indigenous-designed ethics review for all subsequent research. We will design the structures and pathways for a review board, protocols for research proposals, and guidance for ensuring research methods, results and actions consistently consider community members. Our aim is to have an ethics review council that will help researchers ensure that gendered health and wellness research findings will return to the community for their use. The impact of our project will be immediate and long-standing. In the short-term, members of our community will be able to share the knowledge and experience of research, as well as learn about research methods, contributing to shaping how research ethics will be reviewed. In the long-term, we will build on existing Indigenous-led ethics structures and responses to shape the sustained future of the U-IRL.